BME 6850 Course Schedule — Fall 2025
Week Date Subject Textbook Reading* Task & Due
(All deadlines are FRIDAY at 5 PM)
1 8/28, Thursday Introduction: History and examples of machine-learning (ML) applications. ML experiments, Part 1: Design and resampling methods. Ch. 1;
Ch. 20.1-20.6
PC: Ch. 1
ISL: Ch. 5
2 9/4, Thursday Supervised learning: Multiple classes. Regression. Model selection and generalization. Ch. 2 ISL: Ch. 2.1.3-2.1.5
ISL: Ch. 3.1-3.2
3 9/11, Thursday Bayesian decision theory: Classification, risk, and discriminant functions. Naive Bayes. Ch. 3 PC: Ch. 2.1-2.3 Start thinking/planning your course project and writing project proposal; Homework #1 posted
4 9/18, Thursday Parametric methods: Maximum likelihood. Bias and variance. Bayes estimator. Classification. Regression. Model selection. Ch. 4 PC: Ch. 3.1-3.5
5 9/25, Thursday Multivariate methods: Parameter estimation. Missing values. Multivariate normal. Classification and regression. Ch. 5 PC: Ch. 2.4-2.6
ISL: Ch. 4.3-4.4
Homework #1 due; Homework #2 posted
6 10/2, Thursday Dimensionality reduction: Principal component analysis (PCA). Embedding. Factor analysis. Singular value decomposition. Multidimensional scaling. Linear discriminant analysis. t-SNE. Applications. Ch. 6 PC: Ch. 3.7-3.8
ISL: Ch. 6; 12.2
Project Proposal due
7 10/9, Thursday Fall Break (no class)
8 10/16, Thursday Clustering: Mixture densities. k-means. EM algorithm. Spectral and hierarchical methods. ML experiments, Part 2: Evaluation: measuring and comparing performance. Ch. 7;
Ch. 20.7-20.15
PC: Ch. 3.9
ISL: Ch. 12.4
Homework #2 due; Homework #3 posted
9 10/23, Thursday Nonparametric methods: Density estimation and extension to multivariate data. Classification. Nearest neighbor. Regression. Ch. 8 PC: Ch. 4.1-4.6
10 10/30, Thursday Decision trees: Classification. Regression. Pruning. Multivariate trees. Linear discrimination: Generalizing the linear model. Geometry. Parametric discrimination. Logistic discrimination. Applications. Chs. 9, 10 PC: Ch. 5.1-5.4
ISL: Ch. 8.1
11 11/6, Thursday Multilayer perceptrons: Introduction and background. Training. Deep Learning, Part 1: Multilayer. Backpropagation. Overtraining. Autoencoders. Fully connected neural networks (FCNNs). Ch. 11 PC: Ch. 6.1-6.4
ISL: Ch. 10.1-10.2
Homework #3 due; Homework #4 Posted
12 11/13, Thursday Deep Learning, Part 2: Multiple hidden layers. Regularization. Convolutional layers and image analysis. Learning sequences. Generative adversarial networks (GANs). Transformer models. Applications. Ch. 12 PC: Ch. 6.8; 6.10
ISL: Ch. 10.3; 10.7
Progress Report due
13 11/20, Thursday Kernel machines: Optimal hyperplanes. SVM. Kernel trick. Multiple and multiclass kernels. Regression. Kernel Dimensionality Reduction. Ch. 14 PC: Ch. 5.11
ISL: Ch. 9
Homework #4 due
14 11/27, Thursday Thanksgiving Break (no class)
15 12/4, Thursday Combining multiple learners: Generating diverse learners. Methods for combining. Voting. Bagging Boosting. Fine-tuning and cascading. Reinforcement learning. Ch. 18 PC: Ch. 9.5-9.7
ISL: Ch. 8.2
16 12/9, Tuesday Presentation of term projects
17 12/16, Tuesday Final exam 5:20 pm - 8:20 pm in PHIL 109
18 12/19, Friday Term Project (final) Report Due (no class) Due at 5 pm on the day. No late submission.
END
Textbook:
E. Alpaydin, Introduction to Machine Learning, 4th Edition. The MIT Press, 2020
*Readings refer to the recommended references:
▪ ISL: G. James, D. Witten, T. Hastie, and R. Tibshirani, An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in Python. Springer, 2023
▪ PC: R.O. Duda, P.E. Hart, and D. G. Stork, Pattern Classification, 2nd Edition. Wiley, 2001